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PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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I wonder if it's possible ...and not overly undesirable... to have your instance essentially put an import tax on other instances' votes. On the one hand, it's a dangerous direction for a free and equal internet; but on the other, it's a way of allowing access to dubious communities/instances, without giving them the power to overwhelm your users' feeds. Essentially, the user gets the content of the fediverse, primarily curated by the community of their own instance.
when you say import tax do you mean actual monetary payment? Or a computing power tax? I don't think I understand
I was reading it as lowering the value of an upvote from instances that are known to harbor click farming accounts. I could be wrong though.
Creating a foreign exchange for upvotes? 1 upvote from lemmy.world account = 25 upvotes from acconamatta.basementlemmy?
Maybe adjust by the number of upvotes coming from that instance (negatively) and by the number of upvotes users of your instance give over their (positively). If one instance spams upvotes, these upvotes loose value. If posts on that instance are popular with your users, the upvotes coming from that instance are more likely to have been made by real users. Maybe we can find a better metric to estimate the number of real, active users on another instance.
Sounds interesting, imilar to the way googles page rank works.
Yeah, that's the idea
Edit: but I was thinking the result to be specific to your instance, rather than a fediverse-wide vote-rank standardisation.
So, e.g. to a viewer signed into lemmy.ml votes from within lemmy.ml would count more; but to the member of ispamlemmywithhate.crap, votes from ispamlemmywithhate.crap would count more
That defeats the purpose of decentralization and creates a dangerous precedent. The entire point of Lemmy is that every instance is equally valid and legitimate. If certain instances are elevated above others, we're on our way to do what Gmail and Microsoft did to email.
So, I didn't mean instances treated unequally in the grand, set-in-protocol scheme of the fediverse - as if some centralised authority/agreement that this instance counts for more than that. Just as defederation doesn't make meta's instance authoritatively illigitimate.
But an instance can choose, within that instance, to defederate with another; likewise an instance within itself could deprioritise some or all others' instances' votes.
Still agree dangerous precedent ...but still wonder if some sort of instance-controlled moderation of external content is eventually necessary in the future. Or, I suppose, there could be separate services (much like ad-block lists) that users individually could enable to auto-moderate/adjust their own feeds.
And (sorry for waffling!) I suppose it depends a lot on how much you browse specific communities and how much you scroll "all" or whatever. Back in the before-days, I'm used to subbing to very few communities, and generally lazily browsing r/all
Out of interest, within a community (that's what a sublemmy is called, right?) is there any facility to prioritise votes of people subscribed to that community over those not subscribed? Was that the thing with brigading before (sorry, didn't realise this before!) that mods can moderate and ban posts/posters but not votes/voters?
I agree it would be a dangerous precedent.
Thing is, though, every instance is not equally valid and legitimate: that's the reason for defederating from Threads.
Not sure what you mean by what Gmail and Microsoft did to email? Do you mean that they assume many unknown email origins are spam? Though Gmail's obviously attracted a lot of users, and I myself have moved off it now to paying for my email provider elsewhere, I was under the impression it's been quite good for email and for pushing secure email, and being good at anti-spam.
I mean that Microsoft and Gmail took over the email protocol and right now if you stand up your own email server with a new domain/IP you basically have zero chance to get your mail delivered anywhere. They've positioned themselves as "higher" authority because of the sheer number of users they control and can now control the entire email system.
Same thing could happen with instances if we elevate lemme.world or any other instance to be "more legitimate" so their user votes count higher.
Uh no. Just implement DKIM if your messages are not being sent correctly. Spam is killing email, making admins implement more protocols such as DKIM but that isn't "google and Microsoft killing email"
Oh, I'm not saying I agree, I definitely think it sets a dangerous precedent